Over the course of his career, MacIntyre went from an extreme left Marxist to an extreme right Thomist, and the only constant was his hatred of liberalism. He really couldn't stand the idea that people could believe in rationalism, feel the moral force of individual rights, or make purpose and meaning for themselves, all without appealing to an authoritarian source of control.

As the joke from the 00s went - in other news, Cisco has become today the first company to close its doors because all its employees cashed out their stock options and quit.

That is, hanging rich persons from the lamp posts is probably not the maxim that would resonate well on the HN :)

-- Richard Taruskin [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...

What makes you think that? A huge part of After Virtue (basically the whole part, after the initial diagnosis of where we are now and how we got here) is about how to construct and understand communities that might provide a shared idea of human good without simply going back to an Athenian idea of what that looks like. In fact if I were to summarize the book in a nutshell I would argue its an attempt to rehabilitate Aristotelian ethics without simply accepting Aristotle's own moral percepts.

If one considers that these two are decoupled, it poses a question: how could one live in alignment to a universal truth that one cannot know. It makes me wonder, can we find meaning without certainty.

Even in this age of the rejection of religious dogma, I tend to notice that people still want to cling to certainty. They are certain there is no morality (nihilism) or they are certain that morality can be found either in the study of nature (through empiricism) or reason (through rationalism).

I hardly ever see anyone suggest that they humbly do not know.

Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture.

Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history.

(Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue